Warex Fire declared contained

The Warex Fire on the Rexford Ranger District of the Kootenai National Forest was declared 100-percent contained as of 8 a.m. on Saturday with control by Tuesday.

The official size of the fire, which started with a lightning strike the previous weekend, was 49 acres. Management was transferred from the Kootenai National Forest Type III team back to the Rexford Ranger District on Saturday morning. The remaining hotshot crew and overhead personnel were demobilized Saturday afternoon.

Objectives for the days following containment included patrol, mop up, and fireline rehabilitation work by district personnel.

The largest fire on the Kootenai so far this season, the blaze was located entirely on Forest Service land about 25 miles south of Eureka with the nearest private residence about 10 miles away. Ground-based crews initially faced a two-hour hike to the fire from Montana Highway 37. They were joined last Tuesday by a team of nine smokejumpers, and a bulldozer was used to open an overgrown road to allow vehicles to drive closer to the fire.

Two helicopters were also used to make water drops on the fire and deliver supplies to the crews on the ground, and an air tanker made drops before being diverted last Wednesday to a fire near Missoula.

Lightning strikes are credited with starting a total of eight fires discovered on the Kootenai over the 10 days. After Warex, the largest was a fire behind Canoe Gulch Ranger Station that grew to around 5 acres before being extinguished last Friday with the help of airborne water drops.

"If we wouldn't have had our Type 1 helicopter flying over it right about the time we found it, it would have been a little bigger," said Mickey Carr at the KNF fire dispatch office.

Other small fires were spread around the Kootenai, including the Three Rivers and Cabinet ranger districts.